


(i think i'm) ready to take this song off repeat

by mapped



Series: grow [1]
Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Campaign 01 Season 02: Fantasy High Sophomore Year (Dimension 20), Coming Out, F/F, First Kiss, Getting Together, Healing, Past one-sided Sam Nightingale/Penelope Everpetal, Repression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:35:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23864623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: It isn't until Sam befriends Aelwyn that she starts to come to terms with all the unresolved feelings she had about Penelope.And now it looks like she might be having the same kind of feelings about Aelwyn, too.
Relationships: Aelwen Abernant/Sam Nightingale
Series: grow [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1740139
Comments: 31
Kudos: 146





	(i think i'm) ready to take this song off repeat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rainny_days](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainny_days/gifts).
  * Inspired by [but then you're still left with your hands](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23518462) by [rainny_days](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainny_days/pseuds/rainny_days). 



> For Rain 💜 I haven't been able to stop thinking about your lovely Sam/Aelwyn fic, and then all of the feelings I had in S1 about Sam/Penelope came rushing back, so this happened.
> 
> Title from MUNA - 'Grow'.

Sam still catches herself thinking about the smell of Penelope’s perfume sometimes, the rich floral bloom of it. Some mornings when she’s halfway between sleep and waking, when milky gold light starts to reach for her through her bedroom window, she gets the sense that Pen’s in her bed with her, and she’s trapped in the memory of a long-ago sleepover, as though in a palimpsest.

And she would know, about being trapped in palimpsests.

The rest of the Maidens are all happy that Penelope died. When they talk shit about her, which isn’t often but it’s often enough, Sam joins in. Of course she hates Penelope. Penelope was her best friend, and Penelope was just fine with the idea of Sam being sacrificed to a dragon all so that she can become eternal fucking prom queen.

Sam hates her.

But she’s dead, and there’s something so deeply dissatisfying about hating someone who’s dead.

Which is why when Aelwyn walks into the room at the Mordred Manor housewarming party, with her long blonde hair and dangly earrings, the first thing Sam thinks is: _Why aren’t you dead, if Penelope had to die?_

It surprises her, the viciousness of this thought, the heat of it unfurling inside her.

But she sees how unsure Aelwyn looks, not her usual confident self at all, and her heart softens, just a little.

She watches Aelwyn throughout the party, warily, and this is what she observes: Aelwyn accidentally spills a drink on the floor, barely talks to anyone, and keeps just staring into the distance.

Turns out it’s not much fun hating someone who’s alive, either, when they look like they just don’t know what to do with the fact of their existence anymore.

She and Aelwyn have hung out before, but only while Pen was there. She never liked Aelwyn much, back then, or maybe she just never liked anyone who took Pen’s attention away from her. But now Pen’s gone, and Sam’s own attention has felt directionless since then. She has the Maidens, and she loves all of them and their endless drama very much, but.

Pen was different.

“You look like you’ve been through a palimpsest and back,” Sam says, walking up to Aelwyn.

Aelwyn looks up, startled, from where she’s sitting on the sofa. “Hmm. You’re not far wrong, actually.” She closes her eyes, and Sam wonders what she’s thinking about. 

“Is it weird for you, not being the center of attention at a party?” Sam asks. Aelwyn was always in the lap of some guy or other, she remembers.

Aelwyn’s eyes flicker open, and she raises an eyebrow in a perfect arch. “Oh, you mean I haven’t got a bunch of guys fighting over who gets to make out with me? I hadn’t noticed.” She draws her legs up sideways onto the sofa, tugging at the hem of her skirt to make sure it doesn’t ride up too much. “It’s fine. None of those guys ever really deserved _this_.” She gestures at herself in her white halter top, bare shoulders and bare arms and all.

Despite herself, Sam wants to agree, but she bites her lip and doesn’t say so. “I heard you and Fabian might be a thing, though. Is that true?”

“Oh, well. We talked about it. But it’s perhaps more entertaining in theory than in practice. Plus, for whatever reason, the idea of it is tremendously upsetting to Adaine, and apparently I’m trying to be a good sister now.” Aelwyn shrugs, feigning indifference, but it’s clear that what she’s saying matters to her. “And you, Samantha? Still a _maiden_ , I take it?” In that sweetly disparaging tone she has.

Sam rolls her eyes. She’d been about to sit down on the sofa next to Aelwyn, but now she’s having second thoughts. “So what if I am?”

“I just want to make sure you don’t fall prey to another dangerous and creepy prophecy that involves capturing and killing virgin girls,” Aelwyn says, with a dramatic flick of her hand. “It’s why I got rid of my virginity as soon as I could.”

Sam laughs. Some of the other Maidens were rather in a hurry to sleep with people once they got out of the palimpsests. But not her. “If some other horrible villain needs to sacrifice some maidens for their evil plot and I end up in their hands, that’s on _them_ for being disgusting and not on me for being a virgin.”

Aelwyn smiles. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I could do with learning how to think like you. I’ve been told I have a habit of putting the blame on the wrong person.”

Sam smiles back and takes a seat on the sofa.

* * *

Had she wanted to sleep with Johnny? 

She only went out with him because Pen said, _He’s hot and he likes you, you should go for it._ When he didn’t seem interested in doing anything more than kiss her, she was almost relieved. He was—hot, sure. She liked the leather jacket and the motorcycle. But she didn’t really think she was ready for sex, although she was kinda curious about it. Pen certainly seemed to enjoy sex with Dayne.

That was it. Pen spending all her time with Dayne and telling Sam about sex. That was what made Sam go out with Johnny, because she wanted to have somebody of her own. She wanted to know what it was that made Pen gush about Dayne.

What was it that made her want to be eternal prom queen with Dayne Blayde as her king?

In middle school, Pen told Sam she’d never let a boy come between them, and Sam believed her, for the longest time.

She couldn’t even imagine how a boy could possibly come between them. She knew Pen’s dad like her own parents. She knew Pen’s house like her own house. Which kitchen cupboard the cookies were kept in, where to find the emergency tampons in the bathroom, and which drawer in Pen’s bedroom had all the nail polish. They did their homework together, they practised spells together, and they danced to stupid pop music together until they collapsed in a giggling heap on the fluffy pink rug on Pen’s floor. Two sorceresses, born with magic in their blood.

Pen used to say they were born to be each other’s friend, too.

Sam goes over to Mordred Manor often these days. She likes how big it is, how easy it is to get lost in it. How it doesn’t feel like a place she can ever know every nook and cranny of.

Aelwyn shares a room with her sister in the tower, but she’s also found another room just for herself, to study in. Sam hangs out with Aelwyn in that room most days. It’s weird, being good friends with a wizard. Seeing the stacks of enormous books that Aelwyn spends all day reading. It seems like so much _work_.

“Do you ever wish you didn’t need to work so hard to learn magic?” Sam asks, sitting cross-legged on the floor and leafing casually through one of those books. She doesn’t understand half the words in it. She’s only ever had to listen to the sound of the magic inside herself, like waves crashing against a shore.

“It’s all I know how to do.” Aelwyn sounds tired. She looks tired, too, most of the time. She tries to cover it with make-up, but it’s in the way she holds herself, like she thinks she’s going to fall apart if she doesn’t keep her back straight. “I’m a wizard, and I’m an excellent wizard, and I’m proud of that. I don’t know what I’d be without it.”

Sam wants to just touch Aelwyn, sometimes. Just hug her and hope she knows she can let herself curl into it. “You’re a sister and a friend, too.”

“I’m not sure I’m much good at either of those things yet.” Aelwyn’s smile is a bitter one. “I spent most of my life just trying to be a good daughter, and now I don’t really have that anymore, and it turns out that in order to become a good sister and a good friend, I have to unlearn everything that I did to be a good daughter, so that’s really messing with me.”

“You’re not a bad friend,” Sam says, automatically, wanting to wipe the sadness from Aelwyn’s face. “I should know, I had the worst best friend of all time.”

“The worst best friend,” Aelwyn repeats, thoughtfully. “I don’t know, does that really make you a brilliant judge of whether your friends are good or not? I should think it’s quite the opposite.” A glittering spark returns to her eyes.

“Okay, you _are_ the worst.” Sam casts her Shape Water cantrip, making some of the water in Aelwyn’s glass rise up and splash onto Aelwyn’s face. “Happy now?”

Aelwyn claps her hand to her dripping face, looking scandalized. She mutters something and motions with her hands, and Sam starts laughing hysterically, rolling on the floor.

Embarrassing. Get a grip, she thinks to herself, and finally sits up after what feels like a whole minute, clutching her stomach which hurts from laughing. She glares at Aelwyn.

“Yes, I’m ecstatic,” Aelwyn says, smugly.

“You suck,” Sam says, but she doesn’t mean it. She feels comfortable here, in this room where she just got hit with Tasha’s Hideous Laughter. Summer’s almost here, her favorite season, and the air smells sweet. The light pouring through the open window strikes Aelwyn’s hair just so, creating a waterfall of gold. “Do you miss them? Your parents?”

She expects Aelwyn to deflect, or lie, or provide some kind of non-answer, but Aelwyn just says, “Unfortunately, yes.” And then: “Do you miss her?”

“Pen?” Sam plucks at the hem of her skirt. “Yeah, I do.” She’s never admitted that to anyone before. She’s supposed to hate Penelope Everpetal with all her heart, but god. She only gets to grow up once, and Pen was the girl she grew up with, and she’ll never get to have that again with anyone else. Climbing every tree in Pen’s garden and swimming in Pen’s pool every summer. Blueberry pancakes on Pen’s birthday, and pumpkin spice lattes in the fall. Buying their first bras when they were eleven, and—

She looks up at Aelwyn and her cloud of gold hair, and that soft, sad mouth, glossy with coral lipstick. She thinks: _We’re both still teenagers, just about._ She thinks: _I’m still growing up._ She thinks: _I hope I picked the right friend this time._

But there’s something about Aelwyn that makes her feel seen, in a way that she never even felt with Pen. Pen was—they were kids, they were tiny, they didn’t choose each other as much as they just latched onto the first person within easy reach. But Aelwyn.

Aelwyn, Sam wants to choose.

* * *

Maybe sometimes she thought about what it might be like to dance with Pen at prom. Maybe when she braided Pen’s hair, she felt the urge to stroke Pen’s cheek. Maybe when Pen was doing her make-up for her, it made her feel fluttery and strange, Pen so close to her and looking at her face so intently, holding her chin.

Maybe at sleepovers, when they were in the same bed, whispering to each other with the lights out, she wanted to—

Sam doesn’t ever let herself dwell on that.

But she’s painting Aelwyn’s nails a bright mint, which Aelwyn picked because _I like this colour, it makes me think of you_. She’s got Aelwyn’s hand resting against her thigh, and she’s trying not to think about how much she likes it there, warm and solid on her skin. She’s focusing on each small and precise sweep of the brush, but still.

It’s there, thrumming through her. That desire to get closer.

“It’s just that there were rules,” Aelwyn is saying, “difficult rules but rules nevertheless, for how to earn their love, and I knew my way around those rules. And now it feels like I’ve been pushed out to sea and set adrift and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do if I want people to love me.”

 _You don’t have to do anything,_ Sam wants to say. _Just let me—_

Her hand shakes, and the brush glides past Aelwyn’s nail. “Oops. I’ll clean that up, sorry.” She can feel Aelwyn staring at her, but she refuses to look at Aelwyn. “Anyway, I was going to say—you should just be more like me. I feel perfectly at home in the sea.”

Aelwyn snorts. “Have you got any tips for that, other than being born a water genasi? Because whilst I suspect not being an elf would solve many of my problems, that isn’t exactly a viable option.”

“Well, hanging out with me won’t make you turn into a water genasi, but my love of water might rub off on you after a while.”

“Hmm, will it?” Aelwyn says, with interest. Her fingers curl, just a little, pressing into Sam’s thigh. And it’s almost like when Sam was a kid and her magic soared wildly through her, before she learnt to control it properly. Aelwyn’s touch zings through her in nearly the same way, except she feels things now that she never, ever did as a child.

Thankfully the brush is safely in the nail polish bottle this time and she can’t make a terrible mess with it. She just sits and breathes and tries not to let it show, and in a moment she can no longer feel the pressure of Aelwyn’s fingertips, as though she only imagined it to begin with.

On her way out of Mordred Manor, she passes Ragh in the kitchen. He’s in his tank top and shorts, and he looks like he’s boiling some eggs. A _lot_ of eggs.

Sam mostly only knows Ragh because he was Dayne’s best friend, and when Pen first started dating Dayne, she’d thought that maybe Sam and Ragh might hit it off, and then they could go on double dates. But that never really happened. It’s kinda funny, thinking back to that now. Sam remembers sitting opposite Ragh at the diner and making awkward conversation while valiantly trying to ignore how Pen and Dayne were making out across the table.

“Oh hey, Ragh,” she calls out. “I heard that you’re leaving for Fallinel soon.”

“Yeah, dude,” Ragh says enthusiastically, turning around. “We’re headin’ out next week. Gay road trip!” He whoops and pumps his fists in the air. “It’s gonna be fuckin’ great, dude. I’m fuckin’ hyped. How’s it goin’?”

Gay road trip. God, Ragh is so different now, and Sam is—envious. She wants to know how he got here, and she wants to be able to do the same. “Yeah, it’s going pretty good,” she says. “Do you have a minute to talk? It feels like we haven’t really had a chance to catch up in forever.”

“Hell yeah, we’re gonna _talk_!” It’s cute how Ragh makes that sound like a threat. “I just gotta finish cookin’ these eggs, bro, hold on a sec. You want some coffee?”

Ragh starts making her a cup of coffee and she takes a seat at the kitchen table while she waits, scrolling through her crystal distractedly. She’s still thinking about Aelwyn’s hand on her thigh.

When Ragh sits down with coffee for the two of them, she looks up. “Oh, thanks.”

“No prob, dude. Whaddup?”

“Um.” There’s no real way to broach the topic gently. “I just want to say, I think it’s really cool, the work that you did to set up the LGBTQ+ student union.”

“Hell yeah, that was fuckin’ awesome. Best part of my time at Aguefort, dude. I’m gonna miss it but I know Kristen’s gonna keep makin’ it bigger and better. She’s the fuckin’ best. Hoot growl!”

Sam takes a sip of her coffee. “Right, I’m sure she will. I was wondering… I know this is gonna be a bit of a weird question, and I’m sorry to bring it up, but. Did you have a crush on Dayne?”

“Bruh, did I! That’s how I realized I was gay!”

Sam frowns, because it _hurts_ , like taking a Fire Bolt straight to the chest. Just the simple ease with which Ragh can admit that fact, instead of having to strangle it in a dark and airless place where no one will ever find it. “Do you… miss him?”

“He fuckin’ punched me when I told him I loved him, dude. He was an asshole. I still cried my fuckin’ eyes out at his grave and then I smashed the shit out of some trees but it’s been a year and I’ve been workin’ on myself and I know I deserve better than him.” He inhales, deeply, and blinks. “We’re movin’ on! Fuck yeah!”

She wrings her hands under the table. “What advice would you give to someone who’s struggling with a situation that’s kinda similar to where you were? I’m just asking for a friend who’s thinking about”—she has to rush to get the next words out before she loses her nerve—“joining the LGBTQ+ student union.”

Ragh studies her. Under his scrutiny, Sam holds herself too straight, like Aelwyn, her shoulders tense and aching. “Bro, we get a _lot_ of people askin’ for their friends,” he says. “And I always tell ’em to tell their friends that it’s okay, dude. It’s all gonna be okay. I had to do a lot of fuckin’ talkin’ about it to get to where I am now, but there are tons of really chill people who will listen to you talk, and I’m one of ’em. Or there’s Jawbone, who is the fuckin’ coolest and knows a lot more than me. So I tell ’em that, and then I give ’em one of these rad stickers that Kristen made.” He takes something out of his pocket and puts it on the table.

It’s a sticker of a sign that says _Being Gay: When you’re here, you’re family_. With a bunch of grapes, for some reason.

“Oh. Cool. Thanks, that’s helpful. I’ll… pass this onto my friend.” She slides the sticker along the table to herself and slips it in her purse. “Um, will you get service on your crystal in Fallinel?”

“Hell yeah, my bro Gorgug sorted that out for me. Somethin’ to do with satellites or some shit. He’s a fuckin’ genius.” Ragh roars this last bit. He must be really proud of his friend. Sam remembers all that drama that Zelda went through with Gorgug during spring break; it was incredible when Gorgug came through. Zelda was honestly this close to fainting on the spot when he called her and said that he’d figured it out.

“Wonderful,” Sam says, standing up. “Thanks for the chat and the coffee. I’ll—keep in touch.”

Ragh nods, turning his attention back to the dozen boiled eggs in a bowl on the counter. “Fuck yeah, dude, anytime.”

* * *

It’s late and she’s watching a movie with Aelwyn, lying on their fronts on the plush cream rug that Aelwyn recently bought for her study, after realizing how much time Sam was spending sitting on that floor. The breeze coming in through the window is cool after the sticky heat of the day. The only light is from the screen illuminating their faces, and Sam thinks about how beautiful Aelwyn looks even in that unflattering light. Her nails are still the same mint green that Sam painted them a couple weeks ago. Badly chipped, now, but she still hasn’t removed the polish.

“He’s hot.”

 _Who?_ It takes a while for Sam to realize that Aelwyn is talking about the elven boy on the screen. She makes her usual _hmm_ sound of vague agreement as she does whenever her friends talk about guys they find hot. 

Aelwyn glances at her. “I suppose he’s too _nice_ for you. You like bad boys, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Johnny Spells?” Aelwyn prompts. “That weird tiefling warlock who thought he was extremely cool? I still can’t believe you were into him. You can do so much better. Look at you. I don’t understand why you don’t have a gorgeous boy hanging off your arms already. I know that _I’m_ trying to make healthier choices because I had a habit of getting fucked up and sleeping with people who aren’t good for me just to feel something, but what’s your excuse?”

“I’m gay,” Sam blurts.

There’s a long second when it doesn’t even sink in that she’s really said that out loud. She’s never— She’s been texting Ragh a lot, and she knocked on Jawbone’s door the other day and had a long conversation with him, but she’s still never even allowed herself to acknowledge the truth fully, let alone come out to anyone else.

But she is. She’s gay. It’s not just that she wanted, sometimes, to kiss Pen. And it’s not just that she wants, sometimes—often, _always_ —to kiss Aelwyn. She just likes girls, and she’s a lesbian, and she wishes the word didn’t terrify her but it does.

And now she’s told Aelwyn.

“Oh,” Aelwyn says, her face totally blank. “That does explain it. Well, the only girls I know who like girls are all taken, but I’m sure we can work on finding you a girlfriend.” She turns back to the movie.

Sam could scream. _I don’t want you to find me a girlfriend, I want_ you _!_ But she stays silent. She has no idea what’s going on in the movie anymore. When there’s a steamy kiss scene, she holds herself so still that she’s barely breathing, and she doesn’t even dare look at Aelwyn.

When she gets home, the first thing she does is take out the sticker that Ragh gave her from the inner zipper pocket of her purse and stick it on her mirror at eye level. She wants to be able to look at it every morning when she’s getting dressed.

It’s silly. It’s just a stupid sticker. But she finds it absurdly comforting, somehow.

* * *

She’s afraid that Aelwyn might stop hanging out with her, but nothing seems to change. Pen wouldn’t have taken it half as well, Sam imagines. Pen was happily dating a boy who punched Ragh in the face when he came out, after all.

But Aelwyn keeps asking her to come over. And she does.

They eat ice-cream at Basrar’s. They make waffles for brunch on Sundays with Adaine. They sit by the fountain at the mall and critique the fashion choices of people who walk past them. The summer stretches on, golden as Aelwyn’s hair, and Sam doesn’t want it to end.

It’s not all perfect. There was the afternoon when Aelwyn couldn’t seem to cast any spells at all, not even a simple cantrip, and she freaked out and cried for a whole hour, crouching on the floor of her study, whilst Sam gingerly held onto her knees and monologued soothing nonsense as best as she could. She didn’t even realize she’d been half-sitting, half-lying at a weird angle until later, when her back was sore for the next day. Aelwyn’s magic, on the other hand, came back within the night—it was probably an effect of the trauma, Jawbone said.

And there was that time Sam was woken up at four in the morning by a call from Aelwyn—she had her crystal on “Do not disturb” mode every night, but she set it to let through any calls from the other Maidens or from Aelwyn, in case of emergencies. This emergency was Aelwyn, barefoot in the cemetery next to Mordred Manor, in her flimsy satin nightdress, looking at a hole in the ground that she must have dug with her bare hands, judging by the dirt on them.

 _Where’s Adaine?_ Sam wanted to ask, because wasn’t that the whole point of Aelwyn sharing a room with her sister, so that her sister could make sure that this shit didn’t happen—but then Aelwyn said, numbly, “I just wish my father had a grave. I’d like to be able to mourn him properly, but I can’t— Adaine wouldn’t—” She broke off into a sob and fell to her knees in front of the empty grave she was trying to dig in the middle of the night, and this time Sam held her, really held her, not just putting her hands on Aelwyn so delicately she might as well not be touching her at all, because she’d been too nervous of what Aelwyn might think, and too careful of the depth of her own feelings.

She held Aelwyn with her whole body, this time.

After that she led Aelwyn back into the house, and she went to fetch Jawbone, and she let him talk to Aelwyn while she made chamomile tea for all of them. She knew exactly which cupboard the chamomile tea was kept in.

And then Adaine came downstairs looking for Aelwyn, and they yelled at each other while Jawbone tried and failed to placate them both, until Adaine stormed out of the room before marching right back in a second later and hugging Aelwyn fiercely. Sam made more chamomile tea and they all stayed up till dawn, talking.

So she knows it’s been far from perfect. But every time she makes Aelwyn laugh—and she doesn’t have to resort to Tasha’s Hideous Laughter for that—it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her. Every single time.

Then one day, Sam gets to Aelwyn’s room in the Manor, and Aelwyn’s wearing a strapless sundress with the back unzipped. Sam’s mouth goes instantly dry, which is dumb—she’s a water genasi, for god’s sake. But Aelwyn looks stunning. Long mascara-licked lashes and warm blusher making her cheeks glow. Her earrings chime as she turns her head this way and that. “Sam! Good, you’re here. This zipper is giving me trouble. Would you help?”

She lifts the curtain of her long hair with one hand so that Sam can get at the zipper more easily.

Sam steps closer, tugging gently at the zip. It does seem a little stuck. But the bigger problem is—the smooth expanse of Aelwyn’s back. The scent of Aelwyn’s perfume, not floral but something cleaner and fresher. Like…

Like a pure breath of sea air.

“Is that perfume new?” she asks, hoping she sounds casual enough.

“Oh, you noticed!” Aelwyn says, pleased. “I like the way you smell, so I thought I’d try and find a fragrance that bears some resemblance. What do you think?” She twists her head around.

God, she’s so close, and she’s painfully pretty, and she _likes the way Sam smells_. Sam doesn’t know how she can bear another moment of this. She licks her lips, and Aelwyn’s gaze dips down to her mouth and—incredibly, thrillingly—stays there.

“Are you going to kiss me?” Aelwyn murmurs. “Because I think you should.”

“Wait,” Sam says, heart pounding. Stumbling over the revelation that Aelwyn _wants_ Sam to kiss her. “I—”

“Oh, come on.” Aelwyn’s eyes are abruptly glittering and sharp, when they were so soft a moment ago. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it.”

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it,” Sam confesses. “But I don’t just want to kiss you.” She knows what Aelwyn’s like. Aelwyn makes out with boys and sleeps with them and then never talks to them anymore, cradling the memory of them like a blade in her hand. Or that’s what she used to do. She hasn’t, as far as Sam knows, done that in months. And Sam doesn’t want to be something that Aelwyn uses to hurt herself. She doesn’t want to hurt Aelwyn, ever. She wants—

She can say it out loud. She can. She told Aelwyn that she’s gay, and she can say this too.

“I want to love you, Aelwyn. If you’ll let me.”

Aelwyn flinches. “I know you’re a virgin, Sam, but surely you can manage to kiss someone without having to… drag _love_ into it.”

Her voice is like the first time someone ever threw an Acid Splash spell in Sam’s way. Just the shock of the pain, sudden and seething.

Sam grits her teeth. Aelwyn does this, she knows. Lashes out. But this isn’t all Aelwyn is. “Yeah, I can manage to kiss _someone_ without falling in love with them, but not you. I’m already—”

Aelwyn hisses a Mending spell at the zipper and pulls away from Sam, yanking the zipper up herself. “Fuck. I.” She closes her eyes. “I just wanted to have some fun, and you had to ruin it, didn’t you?”

“Aelwyn,” Sam says, quietly, not knowing if she should reach for Aelwyn or not. “Love is— It’s not going to _not_ be fun just because love is involved. You know that, right?”

Aelwyn sits down on the bottom bunk and rubs her hands over her face. “Love is _awful_ and difficult and treacherous and we were doing perfectly fine without it.” 

“I…” Sam kneels down in front of Aelwyn. She’s back to touching Aelwyn’s knees lightly, too unsure of herself to do anything more. “Love doesn’t have to be all those things. And we weren’t doing fine without it. I’ve _been_ falling in love with you this whole time. Just because you pretend it isn’t happening doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

“None of it feels real,” Aelwyn mumbles.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ve had to work hard to make my parents love me my whole life, and then I got imprisoned in an orb for _months_ and I wasn’t allowed to trance that entire time, and then Adaine saved me and I had this spell in my mind that was protecting a version of it before I got—tortured, so that erased all my memory of the torture, but I witnessed the result of it later, in Adaine’s memories. The wreckage of my own mind. I still dream about it. My own mind, Sam. It was a smoking city. A pile of rubble. Nothing alive within it. And now I’m supposed to believe that you—and everyone else in this exceedingly weird house—will just _love_ me even though I haven’t done anything to deserve it?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Sam moves to sit with her back to the bed, so she can lean her head against Aelwyn’s lap. She’s never heard the full story before, and it’s— Like glass shards in her heart. “People should love you for who you are, not what you do.”

“That doesn’t make any sense to me.” Aelwyn’s face is still buried in her hands. “You’re too nice to me, I can’t stand it. There’s absolutely no way any of this is real, and it’s all just something my mind invented to keep myself from going insane, because I’m still inside that orb. I must be.”

“Now why would your mind make up a girl who’s having a gay crisis instead of a cute boy?”

“Because I’m _also_ , funnily enough, having a gay crisis?” Aelwyn peeks out from between her fingers. “And you’re very cute, you know. I’d take you over any boy, any day.”

“Oh.” Sam’s heart leaps in her throat like a sleek dolphin. “Would you really? It’s a pity I’m not real, then.”

Aelwyn laughs, dropping her hands hesitantly. She runs one of them, trembling and tender, through Sam’s hair. “This does feel quite real, admittedly.”

Sam clasps Aelwyn’s hand, and holds it to her own cheek. Aelwyn’s knuckles brush over her skin, and Sam remembers going to the seaside with her family and watching the sunset over the ocean, seeing all the water ablaze with fiery light. That’s what Aelwyn’s touch is doing to Sam right now. “It feels pretty real to me, too.”

Aelwyn sighs. “I’m not sure if I really know how to love anyone, Sam.”

“I think you do,” Sam says, softly. “And love shouldn’t be something you’re just doing on your own. I’m here on the other side of it, you know. As long as you want to, we’ll figure it out. Do you want to?”

There’s just the trace of a smile on Aelwyn’s face, and she tangles their fingers together. “Yes, all right. I suppose if I must have a gay crisis, I might as well go all out.”

Sam giggles. She loves that she knows Aelwyn well enough now to understand the sincerity behind that air of reluctance, and to be so very fond of it. “Oh, good. Awesome.”

“Now can we go back to the part where we were going to kiss?” Aelwyn asks. “I thought my plan of seduction was proceeding flawlessly, and then you went and completely mangled it.”

“Oh, you _planned_ the zipper thing?” Sam smirks. “You really are the worst.”

“Shut up,” Aelwyn says.

“But it was kinda working for me, I’m not gonna lie—”

Aelwyn lowers her head and kisses Sam, and she smells, with her sea-salt perfume, like freedom and magic and home, and she tastes like every wish come true, and Sam hopes she can feel just how real this is, and how Sam just wants to love her, and love her, and love her, beyond all logic and reason, and prove to her that she already knows how to love in the same boundless, oceanic way.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments are dearly cherished <3 You can also find me at [reluming](http://reluming.tumblr.com) on tumblr, where I would love to chat!


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